Insight into IoT Development 1000: Why is RFID technology about to experience a major boom?

As one of the key technologies of the Internet of Things, RFID began to emerge during World War II and has been developing for nearly 90 years. With the maturity and popularization of the technology, RFID will inevitably grow and grow alongside the increasing market demand.

Many people's understanding of the IoT industry is based on sensor networks, that is, sensors. In fact, broadly speaking, the most common application of large sensor technology in the industry currently comes from the popularization and application of RFID technology. It is no exaggeration to say that RFID is the case Related apps are all around you, me, and everyone—everyone can't live without them! Nowadays, increasing demand is driving RFID technology into a boom!

In terms of commercial applications, Walmart is undoubtedly the pioneer of RFID technology deployment in retail and logistics, and its strong promotion of RFID has played a crucial role.

Walmart's goal is to be able to track all shipments. Around 2000, after five years, Walmart completed the deployment of five distribution centers, which was less than half of its set target. Despite high costs and inconsistent technology and standards, Walmart still insisted on investing and promoting suppliers to join in deployment. On the path of promoting and deploying RFID, Walmart has tirelessly "educated" its partners. More importantly, Walmart firmly believes that RFID technology will bring greater commercial benefits.

This is the logistics management system based on RFID based on item tracking, item management, and then achieving electronic informatization.

Walmart later helped develop the current ISO 18006-C standard and the "second-generation" label scanner standard together with other early adopters.

Occupying Sanford Retail analysts at C. Bernstein estimate that by adopting RFID, Walmart could save $8.35 billion annually, most of which comes from labor savings by not having to manually check incoming barcodes.

However, some analysts believe that the $8.3 billion figure is overly optimistic. But there is no doubt that RFID helps solve two of the biggest challenges in retail:

Stockouts and losses (products lost due to theft and supply chain disruptions), and just from theft alone, Walmart's annual losses are nearly $2 billion.

Research institutions estimate that RFID technology can help reduce theft and inventory levels by 25%. Coincidentally, the origin of what we now call the IoT concept actually comes from Kevin Aston being responsible for lipstick inventory in a chain supermarket at Procter & Gamble. To better address the problem of lipstick tracking and management, he later collaborated with MIT A dedicated R&D center was set up to focus on this project.

Of course, looking back at history, the U.S. military uses RFID The earliest promoter of technology. As early as World War II, the U.S. Air Force and Navy faced the challenge of identifying friend or foe on land, sea, and air, and developed the "IFF system," which was the early origin of RFID technology.

By the late 1960s, some slightly simpler commercial RFID systems appeared, mainly used for the security and monitoring of items in warehouses, libraries, and similar places. This early commercial RFID system was called the 1-bit tag system, which was relatively easy to build, deploy, and maintain.

However, this 1-bit system can only detect whether the target being identified is present, cannot have a larger data capacity, and cannot even distinguish differences between the targets. Therefore, early 1-bit devices could only be used for simple detection.

By the 1990s, road electronic toll collection systems were widely used along the Atlantic. These systems provided more complete access control features, integrating payment functions and marking the beginning of comprehensive integrated RFID applications. The electronic toll collection system we use extensively today is the ETC system, whose core principle is RFID Technology.

So how does RFID technology work? Sotech

RFID can first be simply divided into hardware layers and software layers.

The hardware layer consists of: electronic tags and readers & writers; The software layer is the data exchange and management system.

An electronic tag (Tag) mainly consists of an upper antenna, coupling components, and an integrated chip. Each electronic tag has a unique electronic code, which uses electromagnetic waves to exchange data with the reader and writer, providing intelligent read/write and encrypted communication functions.

The reader/writer mainly consists of a wireless transceiver module, antenna, control module, and interface circuit. The data exchange and management system mainly collects, stores, manages, and further processes data and information for user use. and control the read/write of electronic tags.

Additionally, the basic working principle of RFID technology is actually not complicated: the RF signal sent by the reader/writer is encoded and loaded onto a high-frequency carrier signal, and then transmitted outward via an antenna.

The electronic tag entering the reader's working area receives this signal. The relevant circuits of the chip inside the card perform voltage doubling, rectification, modulation, decoding, and decryption, then determine command requests, passwords, permissions, etc., and the tag processes it according to the command.

What is the core of RFID technology at BusinessTech?

The answer is the chip! RFID may seem simple, but RFID chips are undoubtedly the core technology!

RFID chips are divided into tag chips and reader chips. The tag chip integrates all circuits except the tag antenna and matching lines, including modules such as RF front-end, analog front-end, digital baseband, and memory unit. The basic requirements for chips are lightweight, thin, small, highly stable, and low-cost.

Domestically, domestic manufacturers have also been able to independently develop and produce low-frequency and high-frequency chips, achieving certain results in small size and low power consumption, with prices over 30% higher than foreign manufacturers.

Additionally, as a carrier for signal transmission, the importance of RFID antennas is self-evident. Antennas are also divided into tag antennas and reader antennas. Depending on the application scenario, RFID is different Labels may need to be affixed to objects of different types and shapes, and may even need to be embedded inside the objects.

In addition, tag antennas and reader antennas are responsible for receiving and transmitting energy respectively, which imposes strict requirements on antenna design.

The antenna's goal is to transmit the maximum amount of energy in and out of the tag chip. This requires careful design of the antenna, the matching of the free space, and its connected tag chips. Assuming use in retail products, if the frequency bands are 435MHz, 2.45GHz, and 5.8GHz, then the antenna must:

First, the size must be small enough to stick to objects;

Second, omnidirectional or hemispherical coverage;

Third, provide the maximum possible signal to the tag's chip;

Fourth, regardless of the orientation of the object, the polarization of the antenna can match the interrogation signal of the reader;

Fifth, it is robust; "Robustness" refers to the control system's ability to maintain certain performance characteristics under certain (structure, size) perturbations of parameters. According to different definitions of performance, it can be divided into stability robustness and performance robustness.

Robustness is key to system survival in abnormal and dangerous situations. For RFID, whether the system does not crash or crash in the event of input errors, disk failures, network overload, or intentional attacks is what RFID is Robustness.

Finally, beyond meeting the above requirements, the cost must be sufficiently low.

As demand for RFID grows, the technical difficulty is also increasing, and it requires scalable development, which requires extremely high costs. Especially for bulk trading products and daily consumer goods, which are price-sensitive and represent the future of RFID The key to a major breakout!

Beyond retail and apparel, RFID technology is also being widely promoted alongside China's rapid economic development.

Currently, RFID has achieved varying degrees of commercial use in industries such as financial payments, logistics, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, identity verification, anti-counterfeiting, asset management, transportation, food, animal identification, libraries, automotive, aviation, and military.

In the future, RFID technology will have six irreplaceable advantages and ensure the orderly development of the Internet of Things through the Internet of Things!

1. No need for visual or batch reading; a large number of RFID tags can be read simultaneously, quickly, and in bulk by readers and writers, allowing hundreds or even thousands of tags to be read at once.

It can recognize high-speed, moving objects such as trains and buses.

2. High capacity: electronic tags can store more information, such as production date, warehousing date, etc., and can be repeatedly rewritten and reused.

The data is instantly uploaded to the system for processing, enabling tracing back to the product.

In real life, RFID has become the core technology of traceability systems.

3. Long reading distance: depending on the reader's power and antenna gain rate, the reading distance can range from several tens of centimeters to a few meters; Now, the distance can reach tens of meters or more.

Because RFID can precisely locate down to the centimeter level, RFID is also an excellent and effective indoor positioning method.

4. Global uniqueness, non-replicable.

Each RFID tag is unique. During the production process, the tag is bound to the product information, so during subsequent circulation and use, the tag uniquely represents the corresponding product.

5. Long shelf life

RFID tags feature waterproofing, magnetic resistance, corrosion resistance, and high temperature resistance.

The laundry industry, animal husbandry, medical industry, and others all have high requirements for label durability.

Currently, typical label retention periods can reach several years, over a decade, or even several decades.

6. High security

One of the core technologies of RFID tags is the chip, which is well known for its high difficulty and cost in chip development. For counterfeiters, the cost of copying is too high, and it is difficult to overcome technical barriers.

In addition, electronic tags have reliable secure encryption mechanisms, and China's second-generation resident ID cards also use RFID technology.

RFID is growing by more than 27% annually. If this growth trend continues, it is conservatively estimated that by 2022, the RFID industry market size will surpass 100 billion yuan.